Once the war began with guns, artillery and air strikes, it now begins silently. Jacketed weapons, the clacking of keyboards, a news story planted to shock the markets, a single viral post on X, a swarm of bots, a defacement on Instagram, a secret network hack or a nuclear facility.
The tools of war are evolving rapidly, but the goals remain the same. A nation’s resources, its people, and its reputation.
Like many other countries, India also faced this war.
In his weekly column Point Blank, Shishir Gupta, executive editor of Hindustan Times, explains how India fights its many narrative battles.
Visualization as a battlefield
Today, perception has become greater than reality. War is waged by other means. Just as armies once relied on precision missiles, hostile actors now use precise tweets, coordinated social media posts, and targeted Instagram content to create chaos and tension.
Social media is a force multiplier, using posts as a weapon against a state with clear goals. Then multiple forces – inside and outside the state’s geographical borders, state and non-state actors – draw on and amplify these narratives to advance their own interests.
PM Modi’s appeal: Don’t wait for Delhi
Prime Minister Narendra Modi signaled how seriously India takes this matter when he addressed the heads of mission on April 30. His message to the audience: Do not look back to Delhi before responding to false narratives about India.
He urged envoys to quickly counter misinformation, use his popularity and credibility, and promised to support them even if they sometimes get it wrong. The longstanding habit of waiting for Delhi’s “duty” means that by the time a response is ready, the damage has been done – a particular problem for a country targeted by adversaries on its western and northern borders, as well as by larger powers seeking to contain its rise.
In this context, the key challenge is speed: how quickly can India launch counter-narratives, refute fake news, expose fake memes, and counter attacks with facts? This is the main counter weapon in this new era war.
China has formalized it by creating a dedicated information warfare division in the People’s Liberation Army. Information has become a battleground where stories, memes and manipulated data can lead to real consequences in politics, markets and society.
When the Prime Minister has to check the facts
One recent episode showed the cost of an inactive response. A misleading story about the foreign travel tax was allowed to spread for nearly 12 hours as the Prime Minister traveled from the UAE to the Netherlands, one of India’s largest investors.
The report’s injurious timing appears to have been designed with a specific purpose in mind. Ideally, due diligence should have led to immediate clarification from the Ministry of Finance, the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting or an official spokesperson.
No one came, at least not in time. This forced the Prime Minister to personally verify the story – an unusual event, which underscored the seriousness of the situation.
Within government, a culture of extreme caution exacerbates this lag. Officials seek assurances from up and down the chain – from the undersecretary to the minister – before acting. By then, the narrative had taken hold. The Prime Minister’s intervention was necessary and a message to the regime: respond quickly, otherwise information space will be surrendered.
Weaponized economic narratives
The foreign travel tax story is not the only case; This pattern was evident when another credible media platform published a story claiming that the country’s central bank, the Reserve Bank of India, was selling India’s gold reserves to protect the falling rupee.
The timing of the story makes it suspicious because it was not based on facts and predicted that the Indian economy was declining, even though the country eventually recorded a GDP growth of 7.7%.
Since such stories appear on platforms that appear credible, investors take them seriously. Once again, officials responded after a significant delay. In such cases, it is necessary to quickly label false news as fake news and impose consequences on those responsible.
Targeting people of Indian origin and overseas Indians: the Singapore example
This new form of war is not limited to attacking a state and its citizens within its geographical borders. Recently, in Singapore, which has about 9% of the population of Indian origin and about 74% of Chinese origin, inflammatory videos targeting the minority population of Indian origin have emerged.
These videos reportedly originated on Chinese platforms before spreading to Facebook, X and Instagram, forcing Singaporean authorities to take strict action.
This incident was more about internal dynamics in Singapore than India directly, but the posts were deliberately designed to target the Indian-origin community and leadership. Indians, through industry and hard work, hold many senior corporate and political positions in Singapore. The aim appears to have been to discredit the successful and upwardly mobile community, including Indian-origin CEOs, investors and politicians. An attack on India’s growing soft power.
Robots, small states and the global web
Now the enemy can come from anywhere. A small group of non-state actors, or even states that do not match a country like India militarily, could create serious problems if not addressed.
In a recent interview with CBS, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu referred to Pakistani botnets that defame Israelis and Jews in the United States and anger segments of American society. This shows how relatively smaller countries like Pakistan or Bangladesh can punch above their weight in narrative battles by deploying bot armies and coordinated online campaigns.
For India, Pakistan and China are the main sponsors in this arena. Both are authoritarian, with their intelligence agencies operating in “mission mode.” They produce large amounts of targeted content against India. This material is then reinforced by representatives in the United Kingdom, Canada, Germany, Turkey and elsewhere. There are original creators, force multipliers, and amplifiers. Within India, left-liberals who hate the current government often end up subscribing to these outside narratives, willy-nilly. Opposition parties can ride on it as well.
Nepal, Western media and minority narratives
The Indo-Nepalese episode about Rabi Lamichhane, leader of Nepal’s Rastriya Swatantra Party, provides a glimpse into the narrative trap. After he visited India and wrote about bringing the two countries closer together, followed by Foreign Minister Shishir Khanal’s visit, elements associated with Aman Ki Asha type groups started wondering why border issues were not raised during the meeting with Indian officials and why Lamichhane admitted that Nepal was encroaching on Indian territory.
In fact, he was telling the truth, and the two sides sought to grow closer, reflecting deep communal ties and open borders. But the narrative has been distorted to generate friction.
Striking with the front foot
Information warfare is now no less important than conventional warfare and more insidious because it is ongoing and often invisible. China’s People’s Liberation Army and Pakistan’s ISI run ad hoc operations, while in India, responsibilities are fragmented, and no single agency fully focuses on the power of social media. However, emerging countries must build “firewalls” – institutional, legal, and technological – to protect their citizens from relentless misinformation and false narratives.
The Indian bureaucracy, which is burdened with… The mentality of the colonial era leads to hesitation, where officials look over their shoulders rather than act decisively. Social media does not allow for such luxury. In this arena, India must be better at attacking – otherwise it risks being beaten by more agile opponents.
